


The Waiting Room

by Allysesierra



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-18 04:07:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11283432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allysesierra/pseuds/Allysesierra
Summary: Having almost killed President Snow, Katniss finds herself in the waiting room-a place where men and women are sold for sex. She meets an enigmatic woman named Coin, and the two grow a toxic co-dependent relationship . The search for Peeta, and Prim, and unfulfilled political agendas creates an undeniable tension between Katniss and her new house mates.





	The Waiting Room

There's this place called the waiting room.  
Let me explain.  
In 2021, prostitution became legal, but was regulated by a federal agency. There was a standard. Women and men who were on death row, or facing years of imprisonment had the choice to become sex workers. But there was a process--a governing system.  
Sex became a form of punishment, recognized in 5 of the districts.  
The waiting room was a big glass box--a display case, essentially, with rows extending from either side like fingers stretching toward some unreachable middle. We had 30 days to acquire a suitor. They'd come in through a back entrance wearing brightly colored suits and spiffy silk dresses. They wore their hair big, and their hats even bigger with tufts of blonde or inky black framing their expensive faces. They'd watch us like animals in a zoo, and they'd whisper, and they'd disappear and it'd start over.  
Again, and again, and again, in endless momentum.  
We tugged uncomfortably at the fabric of our jumpsuits. We tried to make ourselves look attractive. We smeared Vaseline on our lips, and brushed our hair fiercely behind our ears--we'd have done anything to get suited.  
My first day in the waiting room was like a dream--like it couldn't have been happening. The world--my world had become fragmentary, somehow. How did I end up in this place?  
I couldn't answer that question, or, I didn't want to, because the reality of my predicament was too big a burden to bear.  
Before we were lead into the waiting room like cows to slaughter, the attendant dropped a cardboard box full of old things at our feet. There were tiny black dresses, and glittery high heels, and pallets of vomit colored makeup.  
“Whatever it takes,” she said. She always said it. It was her motto. And many of the girls had come to adopt the same sort of principles. They'd do whatever it took to stay out of prison--to get a suitor. They squeezed themselves into impossibly sized dresses and plastered makeup on their tiny, beautiful faces.  
Today, the first batch of women were brought out on display. It was my first time in the waiting room. I fidgeted, stumbled to my seat, and looked uncomfortably away when potential suitors looked in my direction.  
“What's that one's name?” They’d asked the attendant. She shrugged and checked her papers.  
“That's Katniss.”  
They were my first potentials--a man and woman wearing matching linen pant suits. They filled out the paperwork, ran the background checks, and then bailed last minute. I didn't think I'd be hurt by it, but I was--my very first rejection. Facing a life sentence could do that to a person. After a while, everything pisses you off, or makes you cry. That's how it was in the waiting room.  
My fifth day there, and only two women from our batch found suitors--not that we were counting. We assumed sex was undeniably better than prison, but, we wouldn't know for sure until we got suited.  
And I guess they called it getting suited because, metaphorically, they were trying us on--checking the measurements, adjusting us to fit.  
Day 10 was a lot like day one. People came and went--a conveyor belt of unfamiliar faces. I was starting to reconsider. Having to spend 30 full days in the waiting room seemed like a worse option than prison. It was dehumanizing.  
Someone even joked and said they'd choose a woman like they’d choose a dog at the dog pound--non aggressive, well behaved. He'd put her on a leash to see how she fared. Then they laughed and laughed and laughed with their heads thrown back and their eyes closed. They signed the paperwork for some unfortunate girl in room 2, we'd heard.  
“What a bunch of jerks?” Said Effie. She was on death row for killing a government official. And they sent her here because non consensual sex was good enough punishment for a woman whose appearance was everything.  
“Yeah,” I grumbled, adjusting. Always adjusting. We didn't admit our wanting to be suited, not out loud we didn't. We wanted to be suited, though, which was quite clear. That was the whole point of all this, wasn't it?  
Some of the girls saw it as a competition. They hiked their breasts up impossibly high and smirked at us when potentials mentioned their names.  
“What a shit show,” said Effie. “How the hell did we end up here?”  
I asked myself the question often. How did I end up here--in the waiting room. With Effie.  
I wasn't unlike Effie--frustrated, hopeless. I was supposed to be dead.  
And so was he.  
“Who's that?”  
It was a familiar saying. We all looked up to see who'd asked.  
“Katniss,” said the attendant. It was the second time today yet she sounded as though my name was wearying.  
It was a woman in her early forties--silver streaked blunt hair cut, intense brown eyes. Her face was all sharp corners and edges--an ivory colored statue of a woman.  
She looked at me and I looked sharply away. Effie caught my face and turned it back.  
“She's shy.” Said the woman to the attendant.  
“Not shy, new.”  
The attendant gave her my papers. She looked down at them in awe or it was some emotion I couldn't rightly make sense of.  
“Attempted murder.”  
She said it as if she couldn't quite believe it herself. I looked a lot less dangerous in a gray jumpsuit. And I kept my hair braided and draped over one shoulder because Prim thought I looked too sweet with my hair down.  
I shook the thought. Prim was the reason I'd refused to give up on myself. I was alive because of her. I owed her this.  
Effie nudged me softly and pointed to the door which was usually padlocked, but was now wide open. I'd dozed off. Being laden with so many thoughts meant that I lost touch with reality often, sometimes without warning.  
The attendant motioned to me from the threshold. I got up and went to her.  
“You've got thirty minutes,” she said, ushering me into another, smaller room. The walls and ceiling were white. The floor was dingy gray carpet. There were stained glass murals of the Virgin Mary turning the sun beams into a multi colored light show.  
And the woman was on the other side of the room behind a thin piece of glass separating her side from mine.  
“Ridiculous right?” She started. “What do they think they need to protect us from?”  
I shrugged.  
“Haven't you heard? Women are dangerous.”  
When I didn't crack a smile, she looked at me intrigued.  
“You know, many of the women I've come across--they smile and they laugh and they want so much to impress me.”  
“I cannot change who I am,” I said. “I won't compromise my dignity for a suitor.”  
“Dignity?” She said. “Do you know where you are?”  
“Yes. I do.”  
She laughed, sympathetically.  
“So, attempted murder?”  
“He deserved it. He deserved what it almost was,” I corrected. Political figures--most of them, were evil, greedy, maniacal vultures whose self interests trumped the interests of the people every time.  
And President Snow was at the crest of the collective wave of impoverishment and gluttony.  
The woman lowered her voice and leaned in.  
“I'm not so fond of that Snow, either,” she whispered. “I think you’re brave, Katniss. I think you're very brave and that is to be commended.”  
She swept her paperwork into a pile and stood up.  
“Best of luck to you.”  
I nodded, unsurely, and watched her as she left. 

Day 15 was even more excruciating. People who knew who I was were automatically put off. I was Katniss Everdeen. I was trouble.  
“I would almost rather die,” said Effie. “Just look at us. The patriarchy is winning, isn't it?”  
When I didn't respond, she went on.  
“I was so sure, the other day, you'd get suited. I mean, the theatrics of it all. Why'd she put you through all that just to walk away? These people--with their money and their fancy cars and their political ideologies. Tuh!”  
“Don't you know? I'm big trouble,” I said, in a voice that wasn't mine. It made me think of Peeta, who'd said it with a sweetness. I missed Peeta too. I wondered about him often. And I wondered if he wondered about me too.  
When suitors saw me, they'd whisper and point and whisper again to the person standing next to them. I was being shunned by word of mouth. The ones that didn't know who I was inevitably found out, but those people were few and far between. Last year, my face was plastered all over the capital.  
“That's the girl who almost killed snow,” they'd say as they jestered and jeered. Some of them gave me angry looks in passing.  
One by one, the girls were suited. We were sad for their departure. They'd become like family to us.  
And Effie went from being her usual uppity self to being quieter, more reserved. It was a symptom of the waiting room. It changed people.  
“I would rather die, I think,” she said, because death was a lot better than rejection.  
I didn't want Effie to think that even a smidgen of me wanted to get suited.  
It was complicated.  
I did want to get suited, yeah, but being overeager would cost me what respectability I had left.  
Day 20, we mentally prepared ourselves for prison, for death. We spent most of our time in the waiting room with our heads buried in our arms, asleep. Suitors became scarce. Our time steadily wound down.  
Some days it felt like the walls were closing in.  
The attendant had begun preparing the new batch for waiting. There was a boy--someone I remembered from the city. His name was Finnick. His short blonde hair was a Birds nest atop his perfectly shaped head. And his eyes were blue and clouded with so much sadness. When they let him in, I immediately went over to him.  
“Where are you going?” Asked Effie.  
“I'll be back,” I assured her.  
I climbed the stairs to where he was sitting and sat down right next to him.  
“Finnick,” I said. “I remember you from somewhere.”  
“Corvus oculum corvi non eruit,” he said. “We took Latin together. You're Katniss.”  
“Right,” I said. “How'd you end up here?”  
“Better than prison,” he said. “You almost killed snow.”  
I nodded.  
“Almost.”  
“How did we become criminals, Katniss?” He smiled a little. It was cute.  
“How does anyone become anything?”  
“Right,” he laughed, running his fingers through the mess of unkempt hair on his head. Still, he was handsome. There wasn't much that could have made him look otherwise.  
Finnick looked over his shoulder, then fidgeted with something in a back pocket.  
“Take this.”  
He handed me a tiny square of parchment.  
“I've got it memorized. You can keep that one.”  
There was an address scribbled on the paper--an abandoned neighborhood--one of those beautiful ghost towns on the edge of the district with all the half finished house skeletons.  
“The 15th. Peeta will be there.”  
“You know Peeta?”  
He nodded.  
“Be there.”

 

Day 29, the attendant took Effie away and I didn't see her again. I assumed she'd gotten suited. I was happy for her. I was happy for all of them, though, there was no telling where they'd end up in this rotten district.  
I prepared myself to tell Prim the bad news--went over what I'd say in my head thousands of times over. I was going away for a very long time. I'd never see her, or mom, ever again. She'd be devastated. And mom--she'd have to take care of Prim all by herself.  
And Peeta--he'd never forgive me.  
“Time's up,” said the attendant. They cuffed me and pulled me up by the scruff like a dog being scolded.  
We walked down the dark hallway toward the commissary where I could buy paper to write a letter to Primrose, but when we got there, they told me I wasn't allowed.  
“Why!?”  
“Nothing out, nothing in,” said the guard.  
Guards were supposed to be impartial to politics, but many of them held fast to all the quasi political bullshit surrounding my criminalization.  
“I have to write a letter to my sister Prim. She doesn't know I'm here.”  
“That's not our problem.”  
“Whose problem then?”  
“Nobodys.”  
The two men laughed and gave each other high fives because treating people like garbage was cause for celebration.  
My stomach dropped. The world spiraled away toward some endless Freudian loop. Everything around me became a fog and time had stopped, or, had become unbearably stagnant in the absence of familiar faces.  
He'd won. Snow had won.  
I sat in my cell, feeling empty. The insanity adjusted his tie and sleeves and prepared himself for an overnight stay in my pounding head.  
From there, everything just sort of blended together. And I didn't sleep. I was stuck on a carousel of endless drifting--never awake, never asleep. Always hurting.  
Dying the slow death.  
We had dinner at 5 every night. Cornmeal, water, some speckled green mush. When I refused to eat, which was often, they took me into the blue room and shoved a tube down my throat. It became our routine. The fighting, the screaming, the force feeding. They became so sick of my acting out, they left me strapped to a metal table in some old berthing. They were considering a feeding tube.  
A few months later, after having been strapped in the old berthing for weeks on end, the attendant from the waiting room came in and stood over me. The leaden light of noon seeped in through cracks in the foundation. It's how I kept myself busy. I watched the oddly shaped light dance around the floor edges. It's color depended on the time of day. Sometimes orange. Sometimes gold. Sometimes periwinkle.  
“You look terrible,” she said, holding her nose. “And you smell awful.”  
She rolled me out into the hallway, unstrapped me, and helped me into the shower which was empty this time of day.  
“Let's get you cleaned up, honey.”  
“Honey? Don't call me honey,” I thought.  
My knees were too weak to stand. I had lost a considerable amount of weight.  
She helped me undress and guided me underneath the shower head.  
“You've got a suitor,” she said, turning on the hot water. I turned, weakly, to look at her.  
“A suitor?” My voice was barely there.  
She nodded.  
“We made a compromise.” She looked down at me and smiled. “Congrats.”  
After my shower, she gave me a bag of my old stuff--things I brought in all those months ago. I put on the dress my mother sewed for Prim for when she went off to medical school.  
It was a white a-line dress with a bow wrapped around the centerline--pale pink and gray. Ill fitting.  
The attendant walked me out to the courtyard. The gray cement felt foreign under my feet. I lifted my head to the sky and felt the rain. My body relaxed for the first time in months.  
A black car pulled into the car lot. A woman got out, smiling. It was the woman from before--the ivory statue. I barely recognized her with her hair pulled back.  
“So we meet again, Katniss,” she said. She was wearing a dark gray uniform. It made her white skin look unbearably white. She came up to me and put her hand on my face. There was a scar--a cleft shaped one at the corner of my mouth.  
“This wasn't here before,” she said, running her finger along it. I shrunk away from her hand.  
“It's from the feeding tube,” I said.  
She looked at the attendant.  
“Feeding tube?”  
She took her to the side, and they talked in low angry voices. I wondered if it was something I'd done. I wondered if she'd still want me, or, if my unsightly scar was cause enough to have me sent back to my cell.  
Then I thought of Prim and Peeta, and was reminded that I was strong. I had to be, for them.  
The woman came back and draped her jacket over my shoulders. It had begun to pour.  
We walked to the black SUV, and she helped me inside. There was a smell of leather and lavender. I admired the soft, supple fabric under my fingertips. I dug my toes into the carpet, a stark contrast to the cold linoleum to which I'd become accustomed.  
“Welcome,” said the woman from the drivers side. She took off her gloves finger by finger, then draped them over the console.  
“Sorry for the delay.”  
I looked out at the sky through the window. The attendant ran up and handed the woman her paperwork, startling the both of us. It was a Manila folder with a green tag. I knew that tag. I'd seen it before. It meant something.  
Before I went to prison, I worked for a firm in district 10. We filed paperwork for potential suitors and did analytics for the higher ups. I filtered through the overabundance of information in my head.  
Green tags.  
The green tags were for extended stays. Potentials could request to have their chosens stay for an extended period of time in lockup. It was psychological torture. They called it, playfully, breaking in. It was much easier to break a girl who had already been broken.  
“She's not your friend. She's not your friend. She's not your friend,” I said to myself, squeezing my eyes shut so the tears couldn't fall. She was my captor--my punishment.  
I mapped out a plan in my head even though it'd be months, years maybe, before I was able to escape.  
Then I remembered the note from Finnick.  
“Sorry about that,” she apologized, watching me through the rear view with those eyes. Even when she wasn't looking at me, the intensity of her gaze remained etched into my psyche. I was picking up the pieces of my shattered self  
“Who are you?” I asked, sharply. Too sharp. I'd forgotten myself. The Katniss in me was clawing her way back to the surface.  
She smiled and turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life.  
“Call me coin,” she said, pulling off into a silvery gray morning.  
“Coin,” I said, under my breath. I'd seen her name in the papers. She was a lawyer, I think.  
But it didn't matter.  
I dozed off during our commute and woke up to the sound of birds singing. There were never any birds in the city--none that we could hear. None that we wanted to.  
Coin got out and opened my door for me.  
A man in uniform ran up to us with handcuffs.  
“No. No cuffs,” said Coin.  
“Protocol.”  
“I don't give a shit about your protocol,” said Coin. The man backed off.  
“I want you to be comfortable here,” Coin said to me.  
I looked up at the massive dwelling with its steeple and its stained glass windows.  
“It use to be a church.”  
“It's beautiful,” I said.  
“Thank you.”  
We traveled inside where there were people standing around, waiting.  
“A welcome party,” said Coin, seeming surprised herself.  
There was food and drink, and people spilled out of back room, craning their necks to watch us enter.  
“Congratulations,” said a woman in white. She flipped a massive bundle of brown curls over her shoulder, then looked down at me, disdainfully.  
“Why isn't she in chains?”  
“Not for this one,” said Coin.  
The woman looked offended. The room grew silent enough to hear a thistle drop.  
“Care for something to eat,” Coin asked me. Everyone was standing around in silence.  
“No thank you. I'm not hungry.”  
“Suit yourself.”  
“If I could, I would have,” I said. The crowd broke out into laughter.  
Except for the woman in white, who was sneering.  
“She makes funnies. How delightful,” said the woman, facetiously. She turned to Coin and smiled.  
“It's a good thing she's pretty,” said the woman. “She’ll make us rich, unlike the last one.”  
Coin took the woman by the arm.  
“Shut up,” she barked at her. “This isn't the time or the place.”  
I stood awkwardly at the center of their confrontation, fidgeting with the sleeves on Prim’s dress.  
“Let's go,” she said to me, pulling me away toward the stairs. We went down, toward the underbelly of the house and into a padlocked room.  
“This is where you'll be staying. It's small, but warm.”  
It was a beautiful room of lavender and pale pink. There was a bed and a vanity and a tiny window looking out over the garden.  
“Thank you,” I said in a low voice.  
“You should rest,” said Coin. “Dinner is at 5. Alissa will fetch you.”  
She looked uncomfortable.  
“We’ll talk about the arrangement some other time.”  
The arrangement. Right. I'd almost forgotten about the arrangement. My stomach tightened. I was nothing more than a side gig--a man’s play thing.  
I thought about Peeta and felt ashamed. Though no man had touched me, I could almost feel the groping, the poking, and the prodding of some bloke looking for a fling. I lowered myself down into a corner. Coin looked away.  
“Sleep.” It was the last thing she said before shutting and locking the door.  
I hugged my knees into my chest and finally let the tears fall freely.


End file.
